Author: buddycushman

Lately I’ve been daydreaming about driving a stick shift – four on the floor. It’s been a thing. The other day I tried to remember the last time I did, even a three speed – first, second, third, reverse, the magic clutch – and while I’m certain there were times after this, the picture which has come to mind is driving Frannie Cavaretta’s tan-yellow Volkswagon standard shift from Lexington, Massachusetts to Tuftonboro Neck in New Hampshire, both of us wildly whacked on THC in the pill form. 114 miles each way….

That probably wasn’t my most memorable turn shifting through the gears, though maybe it was since I’m still here to type this. Sadly, Frannie, who I was crazy about in those years of in-and-out of college (though too stupid and self-centered to always remember that)passed away back in the nineties. I heard it was a drug thing, but I wouldn’t swear on it. She was long gone and across the country by then.

Anyway, Frannie was kind enough to place me in the driver’s seat that day, engine in the back, four on the floor, and it’s a sweet memory. I will tell you, Frannie and I did a lot of dancing together. She was the best. I’m sure we danced to this one:

In the late winter of 1983 I was hired for a brand new adolescent program – The Drug and Alcohol Resouce Program – as a counselor and referral information gatherer. I was about six weeks from having something of a spiritual experience and getting sober myself. Which is only peripherably connected to girl groups. I guess, me still here to offer all this gushing reverance.

My second year in the program I found myself two days a week in a small office in the guidance department at North Reading High School as an outreach, drop-in, resource, you can even get out of class this way counselor. Referrals from guidance, referrals from teachers, mostly word of mouth gathered a crew of regulars, and one of them was a young lady named Sandra Jeanne. I was there at NRHS more than a school year, and most of the administrators, counselors, teachers, and kids I got to know a lot loved me.

I don’t remember the why and how come of it, but at some point I spent a night or two creating a mix-tape (cassette) for Sandra Jean, and one of the songs on board – the only one I remember today – was “Be My Baby” by The Ronettes. That particular girl group song kind of went to SJ’s head, and she got a little woozy around me. Somewhere, in some box or envelope I have the senior class picture she gave me, which referenced that song and her thinking it would kind of be a cool idea. To be my baby. She never was, and I haven’t seen Sandra Jean since, some 41 years on.

Brian Wilson, genius Beach Boy, has two daughters, Wendy and Carnie, and I’ve read many, many times their accounts of growing up with this — the very first thing they heard upon waking each morning, their dad blasting – “Dum dum dum, Da, Dum Dum Dum, Da………..”

“And if I had a chance I’d never let you go.” Like so many of these girl group anthems.

Long ago I composed a song about my childhood life at The Monday Club in my hometown. This was the first verse:

“When we were young and our souls were young, and we didn’t know what we didn’t know. We spent our nights at The Monday Club in each other’s arms, on the soft pine floor.” Corny, and hopefully a smidge of romance.

I have a hazy memory of the inside of the place, which wasn’t very big. Saturday nights, only Saturday nights. I knew a few dances, like get out on the floor dances. The twist, the jerk, could of done the stroll if I studied at math a little more. I think I was quietly wild enough for an okay watusi. But, all these more than 60 years later, I wished I’d gone all in with dancing. I would have learned the mashed potato, even the pony (like Bony Maronie). And this, perhaps my all-time favorite line in this musical life of mine – “Wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate.” The shimmy.

And slow dancing, oh, slow dancing. Didn’t always get a “Yes,” wasn’t always picked, but still, it was the start of a love affair. With slow dancing. I’m hoping I was with one someone or another, “in each other’s arms,” with this one:

Yes. Girl groups, the Monday Club, me and all of us.

When I was a kid I was blessed to find myself immersed in a musical milieu with three distict ‘styles’ of sound — The Beatles/Beach Boys British Invasion/American counterpart groups; Motown – and growing up in a population of one-fourth/one-third black folks and classmates, and working at a record store two years, there was lots and lots of Motown; and Girl Groups. It would have been a wildly limited life without the girl groups, and was wildly enriched with them. If you know, you know. If you don’t, bummer. Double winner — Motown girl groups.

If I wanted to refer back to last week’s pronoun-less and Chinese poetry fascinations, it may sound like this — “Evening walk, open windows, Ronettes spin, each star twinkles.” Which – far out – is me walking alone 6:45pm, early December passing Liz Precourt’s house and out comes flying through a second-floor window ‘Be My Baby.’ — “The night we met I knew I needed you so.”

When I was growing up in Wareham, MA there were these two places for dancing – The Monday Club, right down from me on High Street, and The Upstairs Cellar down on Main. You best believe both were filled with The Rascals, The Four Tops, and The Shangrilas. And if the creek don’t rise, and I’m right here through Friday, tacked on to every post this week will be one of my 10,000 favorite girl group songs.

Honored ones.

Much magic swirling. Late Saturday calm. Lowest electric charge sparkling the church bell air. Dong dong, dong dong, dong dong.

“Wait for it,” Saturday says. “Wait for it.” Too old to date. Breaking hearted. Someone please confiscate these leaf blowers. Planet sighing, every unnecessary decibel. Rakes? Brooms?

What’s with the only Dr. Wu?

This week’s pronoun-less, let-it-all-hang-out, quietly now, fit-and-start posts have been brought to you by Dr. Wu and Francois Cheng’s “Chinese Poetic Writing.”

So rich, this sparcity.

Look at all these books piled on the small blue sidewalk fetched table. Read them all at once? Piles so heavy the planet tilts.

Cosmic pinball machine. Hometown Zen arcade. Swans bobbing on the flowing river. So many childhood transgressions. Oh! They sparkle with life.

Dizzy selflessness, right there, amidst these flowers. There’s no helping this sputtering practice. No cure, this vast aloneness.

Finally. A little quiet at last, even here. Such a spot-lit place – electric blog. Orange freeze from the dairy queen. Always somebody’s birthday.

Practice. The entire conversation – about practice; as practice. Free speech. It’s other than history considered. The Ten Grave Precepts. ‘Not withholding the Dharma assets.’

Express the inexpressible. Bird song out the window. Refridgerator running. There’s a wildness. There’s a wildness to this practice. (Of living.) Switch shoes. Lazybones summer, with – as – chickens in a coop. That one goose. Looking directly.

All these walks a smidge like Thoreau, in the cabin’s open door. Lingering all day. Free speech. Face painted by the sun. Forever music and dancing.

Conversations with a Missouri girl so open. Wild and brakeless.

The room is not prepared.

Middle road, tar path, someone hollers, “Yo, Cool Breeze.” Nobody but Japanese Maples and Hydrangeas. People on porches, Saturday coffees, Boston Common traffic. The Red Sox are winning. There’s Sister Ray, some of its endless, unexpected hiccups, former lovers scattered, autumn leaves swirling sidewalks, each pair of running shoes – thin, thin, thin. 

Junior + Senior years of college, ‘69 through ‘74, a collection of cats and rolled reefer, frisbee’d Star of the Sea, frisbee on the 114, two Billy’s and a John, a thing ghost-like quartet completer. Is it the pot, floating stretching, olympic-worthy mid-air catches? Look, look now. All the Bills gone. Jack’s in the shack.

So much alcohol, many meetings, cats, kitties, ten hundred stories. What’s help really, really like? Without pronouns. Without explanations. So, yeah, someone yells out, “Cool Breeze?” Wasn’t there always that one saved chair?

Speaking of no explanations – Any artist ever explained? Any poet? 

Bad news from the Doctor, what to do?

Celebrate Saturday, hunker down, reading glasses.

Still, breeze blows beyond, passing trees, out the window, alone along the bench. Crows the only audience. Dragonflies.

Way things are – no sense. Understanding – dark closet.

Pig part switcheroo. That’ll do. That’ll do.

Some days.

By 10:30 in the morning yesterday I had sat in meditation three times, drank a couple of cups of coffee, and written my three Morning Pages in the recliner. I’d washed my sheets and towels, then washed the Camry in a car wash. I was sitting at my rarely-available but there-it-was favorite table at Starbucks with a dark roast and a side of half and half, looking at a poem from one of those books I tend to dig a lot – “Alone, she stands everywhere, leaving no tracks.” My friend Gina had called earlier, back at the studio, and there was poetry of its own in our conversation.

Then, on Zoom, I heard this read in Kentucky from a different poem late in the afternoon – “There are so many unopened presents from your birthday.”

The “leaving no tracks” has a glow for me. The all those “unopened presents” too. I was conscious at 4am of having woken up again and getting yet another chance. Maybe to leave no tracks. Maybe to open more presents.

Yeah. Some days.